Slugger O'Toole

Peston: the blog is the bedrock of everything I do…

There’s an inordinate amount of rubbish talked about blogging, particularly about who ‘gets it’ and who doesn’t . In May 2005, a bunch of Irish bloggers appeared on David McWilliams’ Light Bite programme, and I think it was either John Ile or Gavin Sheridan who said that in ten years time there would be no distinction between mainstream and bloggers, that in fact blogging would go mainstream. Martin Stabe is a mainstream journo who ‘got it’ a long time ago, and he quotes another, Robert Peston at the BBC, who also gets what is for me, its deepest utility: an essential intellectual tool as well as a means for distributing stories he thinks (that is the kit and not kaboodle) matters:

“For me, the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts. It disseminates to a wider world the stories and themes that I think matter. But it also spreads the word within the BBC…”